St. Paul mystery writer John Camp wasn't thrilled to learn
that a copy of the inside cover of his book, "Rules of Prey," was among the
contents of a manila envelope that was sent to a Kansas TV station in February
and has been linked to accused serial killer Dennis Rader.

Nor does he think Rader, who was charged Tuesday with 10
strangulation deaths that terrorized Wichita beginning in 1974, took any
"inspiration" from the book, he said, pointing out that all but one of the
Kansas killings took place before the publication of "Rules of Prey" in
1989.

It wouldn't surprise Camp, however, if the suspect in the
"BTK" case (for "bind, torture, kill") had seen something of himself in the
book's evildoer.

"He [Rader] was a reasonably effective church leader," Camp
said Wednesday from his home in Lakeland Shores. "He was a Boy Scout leader. He
raised children who seemed to be nice enough. In my books, my killers are
always like that. They have all the problems that normal people have. They have
families. They have businesses. They have problems that they have to deal with
that are quite routine. And they are under intense stress from the fact that
they are also monsters."

Camp, a former reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner for the St.
Paul Pioneer Press, has written 15 books in the bestselling "Prey" series. The
"maddog" serial killer in "Rules of Prey," the first in the series, has a
meticulous MO. He taunts police with phone calls and leaves notes on each of
his female victims:

Never have a motive.

Never follow a discernible pattern.

Never carry a weapon after it has been used.

Isolate yourself from random discovery.

Beware of leaving physical evidence.

Camp, who writes under the pen name John Sandford, captures
his character's fanatical urgency  "the urgency that guaranteed the kind
of transcendent experience he had come to require"  as well as his
craving for attention. At one point, "maddog" desperately studies the
instructions for operating a VCR in order to tape the news reports about his
murders. He eagerly digests accounts of himself in the morning papers and gets
up early for the "Good-Morning Show."

He also is a seemingly ordinary guy, an attorney with
duck-stamp prints on his office walls. It is this mask of ordinariness that
both fascinates and horrifies, as in the case of the suspect in the Wichita
killings.

"They're just like the rest of us," said Camp, who as a
reporter interviewed dozens of convicted first-degree murderers, many of them
at Stillwater prison. "But they have this one thing that turns them into a
monster."

Imagine the simple and relatively minor crime of shoplifting,
he said. "You think about how nervous you'd be, how upset you'd be, how worried
you'd be  about the impact on your life if you got caught." Then multiply
the intensity of that, he said, and you can start to imagine the life of a
killer. "They've got this one aspect of their life that is unbelievably
stressful, and, at the same time, they're trying to keep all the other parts of
it operating in a kind of normal way."

While his thinking about killers may be nuanced, make no
mistake about his sentiments

"I make no bones about the fact that I think they're
monsters," Camp said. "They're ill, and it may be impossible to treat this
illness. That's why you lock them up.

"In my books, the bad guys always get their just
desserts."

The need for this assurance, that justice will be done, might
partly explain the appetite for mysteries and thrillers, said Michael Newton of
Nashville, Ind., the author of "The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers" (Facts on
File, 1999). It's not always the case in real life: Of 1,500 cases of serial
killing in the past century, only about 20 percent were never resolved, he
said.

Sure, readers crave suspense and action, and have "the impulse
to be scared," Newton said. But they also want the scariness "resolved in a
favorable fashion  or at least in a fashion that you can put back on the
bookshelf when you're done, even if it's not a happy ending."

Said Camp: "It's been done since Grimm fairy tales. What we do
is we tell fairy tales."

Newton said two of his books on serial killers have been found
with killers. But did his writing contribute to their pathology?

"If you go with prevailing psychiatric opinion, these sorts of
individuals are basically set on their path around the time they are 4 to 5
years old  by detachment from their parents and childhood abuse and so
forth," Newton said. "In most cases, they've already started to torture animals
and assault human beings before they are even of reading age." To have been
influenced by him, he said, "they would have had to have read in the
womb."

Webmaster @ JohnSandford . org13 August 2018

The Prey series, the Virgil Flowers series,
the Kidd series, The Singular Menace, The Night Crew, Dead
Watch, The Eye and the Heart: The Watercolors of John Stuart Ingle,
and Plastic Surgery: The Kindest Cut are copyrighted by John Sandford.
All excerpts are used with permission.